The Latest Developments in PDF Editing

You’ve probably heard how quick, easy and hassle-free it is to edit text in a PDF document and to edit graphics in a PDF document these days. Obviously that wasn’t always the case, so maybe now you want a little bit more information.

Firstly, a bit of background; a little known (at the time) company called Adobe released their Portable Document Format (known worldwide as PDF) to little fanfare nearly twenty years ago in 1993. At the time, not many people took notice - after all PDF documents couldn’t be changed once they were created unless you paid for the appropriate Adobe Acrobat software.

However, it wasn’t long until Adobe started to get bigger and bigger, largely thanks to the advent and growing popularity of the internet and the widespread use of Adobe’s other well-known product, Flash Player. Once email and the internet had taken off, people soon started to cotton on to the fact that PDF was a great format to distribute files.

But why? The main reason was that PDF documents can be opened on pretty much any computer in the World, whether they are Mac, PC or another model, which meant that unlike other competing formats, Adobe PDF was soon adopted by businesses to distribute flyers, brochures and catalogues electronically, and personal computer users who wanted to share letters, posters or invitations. In the past five years we have soon huge advances in Smartphone technology and e-reader technology meaning that the spread of PDF is now wider than ever.

There can’t really be many computer users who have never come across at least one PDF in their day to day use and, until recently, a good percentage of them will have hit the wall of frustration surrounding the in-built inability to edit text or pictures in a PDF. But as we said earlier, the big news is that you can now edit your PDF documents very easily.

There is software available now that lets you edit your PDF as easily as you would a document in a word processor; if you get the right software package you will find that you can delete, edit, retype or add to text, you can move and resize images and use search and replace as you would in, say, Microsoft Word. Some software will also automatically re-flow your paragraphs so that they run smoothly and naturally as well as keep your column formatting.

How do you know what to pick? Well, have a look around online and you’ll find that some software houses are so confident in their package that they’ll even let you have a free trial. With that in mind, you may get an inkling that the software will be good before you even try it.

All of this is possible because Adobe made PDF ‘open standard’ in 2008, giving developers the right to develop software that would allow people to create and edit PDFs. Of course, it has taken a couple of years for the really good work to come out, but now in 2012 we’re in a position to get great PDF editors that work in an easy to use manner. So spread the news!